A 62-year-old Hindu monastery worker was hacked to death in Bangladesh on Friday, police said, the latest in a series of such attacks on religious minorities in the mainly Muslim country. The latest murder came as Bangladeshi police announced a special week-long crackdown on militants as they ramp up efforts to stem the killings, with five members of a banned Islamist outfit killed in gunbattles with officers in the past three days.
Nityaranjan Pande was taking his regular early morning walk when unidentified attackers set upon him, killing him on the spot, police said. "As a diabetic, everyday he walks early in the morning. Today as he was walking, several attackers hacked him in the neck... He died on the spot," local police station chief Abdullah Al-Hasan told AFP. "He had been working at the monastery for around 40 years. In recent years he was the head of its office staff," he said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. But the head of police in the north-western district of Pabna, where the Shri Shri Thakur Anukulchandra Ashram is located, said the killing bore the hallmarks of recent attacks by Islamist extremists on minorities and secular activists.
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